Week 2 Facebook connecting and sharing

Early FB:

• Users create a personal profile (importantly, this is linked to real name, single identity)
• Accumulate ‘‘friends’’
• Post on and view each other’s profiles.
• Join groups based on common interests
• Learn each others’ hobbies, interests, musical tastes, and romantic relationship status through the profiles.
• Bridge online and offline connections
• Social capital and notoriety on the online space 

(Ellison, Steinfeild and Lampe, 2007)

In 2010, Zuckerberg claimed FB’s mission was to build a Web where “the default is social” in order to “make the world more open and connected”

According Taina Bucher (2021), Facebook’s mantra/manifesto changed  “Meaningful Communities”

“Meaningful Communities”
Case Study (1) – Mothers on FB

Chalklen and Anderson (2017) Mothering on Facebook: Exploring the Privacy/Openness Paradox

• FB allows mothers to circumvent some of the social limitations and isolation that often come along with the demands of caring for young children.
• Instant access to friends, family, parenting advice, professional networks, entertainment…The asynchronous nature of the medium makes it especially attractive to mothers, as they can drop in and out of conversations and threads in-between tending to children.
• Gibson (2013) notes that Facebook can help improve confidence and allow new mothers to maintain an identity aside from being a parent.
• Negotiating privacy protection vs benefits of sharing – “the pleasure, information, and affordances derived from sharing—especially children’s photographs, and health and social information—seem to outweigh the risks for the majority, in the short to medium term at least.” (p.9) 

Case study (2)

Man Up – Australian men’s mental health campaign (Schlichthorst et al., 2019)

• Interpersonal conversation and campaign evaluation
• IC “a crucial link between the campaign activities and its desired outcomes …Yet, the challenge of traditional mass campaigns was how to measure conversation in response to a campaign. With social media networks, these conversations are visible and measurable (to some extent), especially on channels like Facebook and Twitter, and provide valuable information on the uptake of the campaign messages.” (p.3)
• Health promotion campaigns are likely to follow multi-channel designs including digital and traditional media 
• Still concerns about misinformation, harassment, bullying… 

Case study (3)

Alternative Health Groups on Facebook (Zimdars, Cullinan and Na, 2023)

Health misinformation

Ontological security

Why people believe health misinformation:

“People join alternative health groups and subs out of their own feelings of distrust and fear, as well as distrust and fear about systems and other people. They also join these groups and subs to find more information and to seek support. Participating in these groups offers members reassurance, support, and information, which may make them feel more ontologically secure.”

Critics of Facebook 

Social media companies strategically frame their own rhetoric; they co-opt the more utopian rhetoric of digital discourse such as ‘sharing’ and ‘friending’ to position themselves and “establish their function as facilitators of social engagement such as sharing and friending, it makes it more difficult to push back. Positioning themselves as an essential tool” (Kennedy, 2013, p.130).

As Helen Thornham notes, “the digital is a highly political infrastructure that works to mask its hard capitalist politics. Their goal at the end of the day is to make money. It does this in a number of ways – through the corporate adoption of benign discourses as a veneer for the economically attuned interests in data” (2019, p.65)

Van Dijck (2013, p.46-47) suggests Facebook seems to have different meanings of connecting: Connectedness vs Connectivity

Connectedness - directing users to share information with other users through purposefully designed interfaces

Connectivity – sharing of user data with third parties

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Facebook compared to other apps and sharing platforms 

case study 1

Facebook - is an unreal depiction of yourselve 

Be real- users post a realistic depiction of themselves on this app